The First Time I Scrapbooked

So over at Scrappy Girl Designs it is a month long celebration for National Scrapbooking Day, and each day a new challenge is posted and you have the ENTIRE month to complete as many as you would like. Each challenge is worth a certain # of points and at the end of the month the 3 highest point totals will win a prize! :) There's PLENTY of time to come over and join in the fun!!

One of the challenges is to blog about your first time scrapbooking. Well it has been SOOO long I will try my best to tell the story.

I started Scrapbooking in my Senior year of high school. By scrapbooking standards today that was the caveman days!! :) I was up in Antioch IL with my grandma at the summer cottage and we went into town to our favorite store Ben Franklin (I'm pretty sure it was still that) it has since changed into my FAVORITE LSS Hannah's!!! Well they added a craft section and they had these BEAUTIFUL fabric covered photo albums there and the coolest pages with pictures and decorations inside. Well I HAD to have one, so I bought all the pieces (yes you had to make your own album!) and stickers, cardstock, and some templates. Several days later when I went back home I opened all my goodies up and the magic began! I decided my first book would be for my boyfriend (now dh) for our 1 year Anniversary (now married for 5 yrs Sat!) I began by covering the covers with blue contact paper and then embellished it with stickers and laced it together with a ribbon. Inside you will find fabric contact paper on the covers and pages FULL of shape cut and zillion matted pics, more Mrs Grossman's stickers than you can imagine, decorative scissor cuts, doodling and dare I say it rubber cement!!! YIKES!!!! I poured my heart and soul into this book and well he loved it, so I then moved on to one (STILL unfinished!!) for my cousins, then one for bf/dh dart accomplishments, and from there we move closer to present day and more recognizable scrapbooking! It was an addiction from the first moment I laid my eyes on those scrapbooks and I have NEVER stopped since!! The excitement of all the fun stuff to play with is something that has never changed! I love saving memories and I want to remember EVERY moment of my life and want those memories saved for my children as well. And that is another reason I find this SOO addicting!

So here come the pics so you you can see how crazy it was in "the old days"!

Here is the "stuff" to put together an album.

Here is the outside cover. Where the space in the center is use to be a cute puppy with a red heart in its mouth! I called dh a puppy dog, he loves music and plays the guitar. Thus the stickers I chose.

This is my first page ever!! Don't mind the sappy stuff! Nice clean lines on the inside cover huh?? What was I thinking???

Gee aren't those pages just lovely??? ARGH!!!

Yes pattern paper is beginning to be popular! I must have been nuts as I used stencils and colored on my pages and I doodled my own background designs on almost EVERY page!! YIKES!! No winder it took FOREVER to do a page!! The little Winnie the Poohs everywhere is because "Pooh Bear" is dh's nickname!

Well these are from my niece's book and well its getting a little better...NOT!! Its funny to look back at these and see that these were SO COOL and that's how we scrapped back then. WOW!! Just think in 10 years we will look back at some of our prized pages from now and say "what were we thinking"!!!

Going back and looking these reminds me of a challenge Dixie Pieces had a while back to scraplift your fisrt LO!! Hmmm... I might have to try it.

TFL!
Valerie